An Australian War Memorial honouring the role of Australian soldiers who fought alongside New Zealand’s military was unveiled in Wellington as the centenary of the Gallipoli landings was commemorated around the world.
The Tonkin Zulaikha Greer (TZG)-designed memorial sits beside the New Zealand National War Memorial Carillion inside Pukeahu National War Memorial Park.
The memorial consists of a series of red stone pillars and polished Australian black granite that depicts Maori and Aboriginal artwork and text extracts referencing battles where the two countries served together. Over 11,000 soldiers from Australia and New Zealand were killed during the Gallipoli Campaign, which took place from April 1915 to January 1916.
Peter Tonkin, the project director and main designer of the project, described how the piece was inspired by a family trip to central Australia, and the “amazing power of those red gorges and chasms.”
“I was trying to get an abstract and symbolic representation of that iconic Australian landscape,” he said. “We felt that the Australian red colour would be striking in Wellington, a city of greystone and not much brick.”
“The red would very clearly signal the notion of the ‘Australianness’ of that place.”
Tonkin enjoyed seeing people inside the memorial touching the various tactile elements of the stonework at the dawn service at the Pukeahu National Memorial Park, which was attended by around 150,000 people.
“It’s a really intriguing role for an architect to try to materialize these quite complex relationships that you have with nationalism and war,” he said. “It always stretches your imagination right to the limit to make concrete something so complex and so open to interpretation.”
The building of the memorial complements the New Zealand Memorial on ANZAC Parade in Canberra, which also commemorates the close relationship between the countries.
TZG has worked on projects such as the National Arboretum in Canberra and the restoration of Eternity Playhouse in Sydney.
